AW: cygwin vfork

[Charles Wilson]

Ralf Habacker wrote:

>> > 3) The cygwin implementation of fork-and-exec doesn't jive well with
>> > the VM size of xemacs. Supposedly a real vfork is in the works for
>> > cygwin but I can't attest to its functionality.


> Can you explain this a little bit more ? I'm asking because in
> http://sources.redhat.com/ml/cygwin-xfree/2001-q4/msg00276.html I have described
> some problems with kde2 on cygwin relating performance and I'm very interested
> in getting more informations how to fix these problems. In short, loading the
> full kde2 desktop needs about 4 minutes and the reaction time for starting apps
> are  > 1 minute. This seems to be unusable.
> My assumption are that these problems depends on application loading (vfork is
> used on every app), file and socket io.
> A regular kde2 app uses about 20-40 dll's, so a faster vfork would decrease the
> loading time. :-)


Well, this is the clarification that I received:

 > The VM comment is referring to the large footprint of XEmacs which means
 > that doing a fork requires copying an awful lot of data (and hence takes a
 > long time), most OS's do copy-on-write for vfork so the overhead is never
 > incurred.

And of course, cgf chimed in on this thread, but I can't find his message 
in my mail archive, and (as mentioned elsewhere) the cygwin ml archive is 
missing his message as well, so I can't quote it here for you.

--Chuck




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